Last week I had a very forgettable meal at Kelsey’s (Caution! Cheers theme music ahead!), a restaurant at the Calgary airport. It’s apparently a chain of restaurants with over 100 locations in Western and Central Canada.
The entire place has this weird, indirect connection to the TV show Cheers. The Kelsey’s logo is similar to the Cheers branding. The restaurant is apparently named after Kelsey Grammer, the actor who played the stuffy Frasier Crane. And the interior of the restaurant was all brass taps and wood panelling, with the walls were covered in cheesy 8 x 10 photos of celebrities (notably, there were no photos of the cast of Cheers). Plus, of course, when you visit the website, it plays the theme song from Cheers.
Here’s what’s weird: I can’t find any direction connection between the restaurant chain and Kelsey Grammer or Cheers. It’s like they manufactured a Cheers-like franchise brand without ever actually acknowledging what they were doing. Does anybody know the back story of this chain?
UPDATE: Hurray for crowd-sourcing. We have more information. As Jason writes in the comments below, he emailed Kelsey’s to enquire about the origin of the name:
Paul Jeffery was the founder of Kelsey’s Restaurants International Inc. and the first restaurant opened in Oakville Ontario, in 1978. Currently we have 125 stores across Canada and 1 in the US in New York. The name Kelsey’s comes from the fact that our founder Paul Jeffery and his brother frequented a roadhouse on Kelsey Rd in Barrington, Illinois while traveling in the U.S.A - hence the name Kelsey’s.
Andrea writes with links to several trademark filings for Kelsey’s. The most germane one is from 1993, where they seemed to adopt a logo similar to the Cheers brand. Andrea points out that 1993 is also the year that Cheers ended and Frasier began.
As I’ve mentioned, during our nine-month stay in Gharb, we ate at Rangers at least once a week. Named after the local football club (not quite as accomplished as their Scottish namesake), it’s a little bar/restaurant run just off the main square.
Tony handles the bar and takes orders out front, and his wife Carmen cooks the meals in the back. I tried most of the menu, but I eventually narrowed my preference down to Carmen’s excellent funghi pizza. All the pizzas are excellent–thin crusts, the ideal ratio of toppings to sauce to cheese, and just the right size to fill you up (those stacked North American pizzas look ridiculous by comparison).
We can’t recommend Rangers enough. It’s run by great people, and is an ideal spot for casual dining when you don’t feel like cooking at home (or at your holiday home, as the case may be). They also have a kick-ass rooftop patio, with a great view of Ta Pinu. It’s lovely to sit up there, have a drink and watch the bats dip and dive as the sun goes down.
This is the first in a short series of blog posts in praise of some businesses we used and enjoyed on Gozo. These don’t currently have much of an online presence, so I wanted give them some online, uh, props.
Maybe every linen supply company does this, and I’ve never noticed it, but I thought this was pretty clever. They put their fax number on every napkin:
This ensures that, even if a restaurant fires its entire staff and hires new people, it’ll be easy for the new floor manager to order more napkins. The lesson here is an obvious one, I suppose: make it expectantly simple for your customers to contact you.
When we sat down to dinner at a restaurant in Xlendi, Monique noted an odd correction to the menu:
I have no objection to people eating horses–it’s just peculiar that they subsequently crossed it out. Did they run out of horse? What meat are they using instead?
In related news, Monique has written an exhaustive and illustrated account of her and James’s first week on Gozo. It’s pretty typical of what our guests do. Give it a read if you want to live vicariously through them. You may also want to check out their photosets.
